[9551] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Learning from the BBSs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Williams)
Mon Jan 10 10:09:59 1994
From: sdw@meaddata.com (Stephen Williams)
To: guthery@austin.slcs.slb.com
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 1994 10:11:09 -0500 (EST)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9401101147.AA12323@asterix> from "guthery@austin.slcs.slb.com" at Jan 10, 94 05:47:30 am
>
> I've often wondered if there isn't a useful plateau somewhere between LAN and
> WAN ... call it NAN ... Neighborhood Area Net. It would cover roughly the
> area you drive on Saturday errands. As I watch the local FidoNet, most of the
> traffic is local, covering a population patch of I'd guess 100,000. This
> plateau seems to be where BBSs have a solid niche currently. A BBS patch i
> constrained heavily by what defines a toll-free telephone call, to be sure.
> Nevertheless without a community of interest there would be no traffic even if
> it was free and what I think I see is that the patch is smaller than the
> toll-free area.
>
> I'm hard-pressed to believe that there are no plateaus between my sister's
> bedroom and Moscow. Business opportunities? How about a neighborhood disk
I call it the 'Local Internet Gateway'.
To be truthful however, once global access is available, locally
confined communication just becomes a piece of the pie. Less traffic
and breadth, but more watched and important.
> farm with automatic backup services? By the way, do the Scouts have a Network
> Management merit badge yet?
I was a data processing VP in JA about oh... 14 years ago. On a IBM
PC using PCDOS 1.0 and 64K ram.... I wrote (part of) an accounting
package. Does that count?
sdw
--
Stephen D. Williams Local Internet Gateway Co.; SDW Systems 513 496-5223APager
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